In recent years, the demand for efficiently managing information technology assets has been made. However, relationships among information technology assets are complicated, and they are not always a one-to-one but multi-to-multi relationship in most cases. Accordingly, it becomes more difficult to accurately grasp a relationship among assets as the number of assets increases. Therefore, measures cannot be quickly taken, for example, in a case where a trouble has occurred in a system including assets, or in a case where system hardware or software needs to be updated. A case where an asset needs to be updated is considered. In this case, a system administrator needs to verify in advance what measures are to be taken for hardware or software, and whether or not there is a transaction (namely, a service for an end user) influenced by the update, and needs to notify a concerned person.
However, if relationships among assets cannot be accurately grasped, the system administrator cannot notify a concerned person and cannot properly update hardware and software quickly. Moreover, there are many management items to manage assets. Accordingly, the system administrator needs to grasp hardware, software, transactions and the like for each client using the system.
To implement this, the following technique is known. With this technique, the extent of an influence exerted on a system that assists a transaction, and the degree of a change of the entire system are initially calculated in response to a request to change a transaction. Next, information of relationships among resources are held, a layer structure is obtained by tracing the information of relationships, and also the extent of an influence is output.
Additionally, a virtual network operation state displaying apparatus for managing a relationship between a virtual network and a network of a layer lower than the virtual network, and for displaying a configuration of operations of the network is known. This apparatus enables a network configuration of a higher layer and a lower layer to be grasped at a glance. Moreover, the extent of an influence exerted by a fault at an occurrence of the fault is displayed to be easily identifiable. For example, a physical resource and a virtual resource are output as layers, and at the same time, the extent of an influence is displayed to be identifiable.    Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2008-250866    Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2004-222105